Status Updates From What Do You Want Out of Lif...

Aging is an equal-opportunity cause of the need to reinterpret our values. ... I thought that when I was old, I would understand everything and coast happily through my dotage without enduring any more existential crises about what I was doing and what matters in life. It has become a bittersweet lesson to discover this is not how life works...'

None of us (even those of us who have a penchant for reflection) has a detailed set of well-defined values sitting around in our brains waiting to be discovered. Rather, we muddle through our life with a general sense of the things we care about and a vague idea of what it means to succeed.